by Lark O'Neal
“You know I don’t mind.”
“Does anyone ever get what they need from their parents?”
One eye slits open. “That is kind of a deep thought for a beach. What brought it on?”
I gesture toward his tattoos and scars. “Your story is written all over you.”
“And yours? Where is it written?”
With a sigh, I shake my head. “I wish I knew. I came here hoping to get some answers about my mom, and why she just stole me.” Leaning back on my hands, I tilt my face up to the sky, letting sunshine fall on my eyelids. “I’ve been here for nearly six months and I still don’t know much of anything. All those years, I thought my dad had done something, but if you met him, you’d see that was just crazy. Everybody loves him—and he’s been married to Katie for years and years and they’re still happy.”
“What does he say?”
“My dad? He says she was unhappy, that she wanted to get out of New Zealand.” I glance at him. “He says she drank too much.”
Tyler shifts so that he’s leaning on one elbow. “Does that feel true?”
I shrug. “She liked her beer, but no more than the average person in our neighborhood.”
“Maybe you don’t want to know, Jess. Maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Maybe.” I think about the night in Christchurch, when I had such a bad dream. “But I think there’s something I need to know. I just don’t know how to find it.” I sigh. “And now that I have to go back to Colorado for who knows how long—”
I halt, realizing I’ve just spilled my news.
“Colorado?” He sits up.
“Yeah.” I take a breath and lace my fingers together. “Right after Christmas. I’m going to Aspen to film a movie.”
His face bursts like the sun coming over the horizon, bright and impossibly happy. He scoots toward me. “Jess, that’s fantastic—”
I have to spill it or I’ll lose my nerve. “It’s that book I was telling you about at lunch, Torches. It’s this tragic, beautiful love story and I really didn’t think I would get the part, but the author loved me in particular and pushed hard.”
He’s laughing, reaching for me, kisses me before I can stop him. I put a hand on his chest. “There’s a little more.”
His eyes narrow.
“Kaleb is the other star. They cast us because they liked the chemistry in the commercials.”
His face is completely impassive for a very long moment. I can’t tell anything he’s thinking, but the evidence of something going on his head shows in the shadows racing over the ocean of his eyes, light and dark, dark and light. I’m braced for his jealousy, anger, something malevolent, but instead he leans in and says, “God, Jess, I’m so happy for you.” He kisses me. “You’re going to be so great.”
“I hope so.” His mouth is luscious and hot and I’m so relieved that I let him tumble me backward, his body falling half over mine. I lift my hands around his neck.
His fingers trace my jaw. “The world is seeing in you what I saw, that very first day.” His finger strays toward my ear lobe, brushes over my eyebrow. “The commercials made me so jealous, but I knew exactly why they wanted you. The camera loves you, and you’re so genuine.”
“But is acting the same as being genuine?” I pose the question, and only then hear how it sounds, that I wasn’t acting, that I was crazy for Kaleb, which is kind of true. “I mean, I was acting a lot, but—”
His finger lands on my lips. “Don’t explain,” he whispers. “Just be yourself and everything will be all right.”
He dips in to kiss me, then, slow and heartfelt, and my whole body responds. His bare skin is hot from the sun, and I move my palms over the curves of his shoulders as his mouth sensually and slowly sips at every inch of mine. He shifts, too, sliding me closer so that his knee falls between my legs. When he opens his mouth to seek the heat of mine, I’m opening to receive him, the thrust and heat. Against my hip is a very insistent hard-on, and he moves it against me ever so slightly. “I haven’t been with anyone since the last time we were together.”
My eyes fly open. “Tyler! I never asked you to do that.”
He dips and kisses me, eyes still on mine. “I know. I might not stick with it, either. I’m telling you the truth. It gets lonely. But I didn’t want to.”
It breaks my heart into a thousand pieces, and I wish I could go back to—
To what moment, which one? Which thing wounded our budding relationship the most?
I put my hands on his face, stroke his jaw. “I don’t want to talk.”
“Funny,” he says, his voice rumbling low in his throat, “me, either.”
And then we’re making out under a hot blue New Zealand sky and we can’t go too far because we’re in public, so I give myself up to it, to this moment. To now, when I am twenty and Tyler Smith is kissing me like he would disappear under my skin. As my body comes alive under his touch, as I stroke his long back and press upward, I forget anything but right now, this, with him.
It’s enough.
* * *
Nelson is known for brew pubs, and as the afternoon slips toward evening, we head back to the general area of downtown to find one, holding hands. We’re both sun-drunk and a little sunburned. My lips are chapped from all the kissing.
“I’m pretty jet lagged,” he confesses. “And I haven’t been drinking, so a couple of beers is going to put me under the table.”
“Your coach will kill me if I let you get drunk.”
He nods ruefully. “True.”
We sit close to the window, tucked into a booth that overlooks the street and the parade of people going by, and order some pints and a basket of chips. He settles beside me instead of opposite, and I’m glad.
“I have something to show you,” he says, and pulls out his phone.
“That’s going to cost a fortune to use here.”
“I’ve been traveling so much I bought an international plan,” he says.
“How are you paying for all of this?” I ask suddenly. “Do you have a sponsor or something? It’s got to be very expensive.”
For a minute, he keeps his eye on his phone, then admits, “My dad. When the judge gave me that reprieve, I called my dad and asked if he’d sponsor me. I have a trust fund, but I can’t touch it until I’m thirty, so we worked out a deal.”
“A trust fund.” It makes me feel slightly hostile and I take a sip of ale, letting it cool my hot throat.
“I know,” he says, and then shakes the too-long hair out of his eyes and meets my judgmental gaze head-on. “I didn’t choose where I was born any more than you did, Jess.”
“You’re right. I don’t know why I’m being so bitchy.”
“Look,” he says, and puts the phone in my hand. The screen shows a painting of me, drawn from the sketches he did last summer, all eyes and hair and long limbs, but this one is so much better than the ones he did before that it’s kind of astonishing. It’s hard for me to find the words for why—but everything about it is better, more sophisticated, more confident. “Wow, Tyler,” I say in a hushed voice. “It’s really good.”
He nods without arrogance. “Swipe right. There are more.”
I follow instructions and there is another, a nude but one that’s very discreet, just my back and hair and sleeping face. Another, pensive, looking up in wariness, which plucks my heart. He saw me.
And they’re all like that, revealing a little something I honestly didn’t know he understood about me. Amusement, intelligence, vulnerability, strength.
The last one is not me, and it sends a shock through my spine, because it’s Kaleb, staring straight at the camera in complete opacity, the exaggerated eyes tilted and utterly steady. “When did you shoot this?”
His body is close as he looks over my shoulder. “The night you talked to me from Queenstown. Remember you turned the camera around?”
“What made you shoot the photo?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t k
now. You sent a picture in email and there’s something about his face that wants painting. He looks like a tiger.”
I stare at it and see that Tyler has captured Kaleb, too, the magic in those eyes. It sends an odd ripple through me, as if there’s a pinch in the time-space continuum, and I think of his mouth on my throat, his breath in my ear, and there’s suddenly a hard, tight knot at the bottom of my throat. I hand the phone back to Tyler, feeling guilt in two directions. Striving to sound normal, I say, “They’re very, very good, Tyler. What changed?”
He takes the phone and swipes backward, pausing for a moment at each one. “I’m not sure. Me, maybe. I just couldn’t stop until it felt right.” He laughs without humor. “I must have done a thousand drawings. Not kidding. Maybe more.”
The purple light of evening comes in from the window and splashes over the angles of his face, highlights the streaks in his hair, and all at once I feel his conflict, his pain, his losses, his deep desire to get things right. Without thinking, I reach up and touch his shoulder. “They’re good.”
He turns his head, and I’m slammed with the vivid pale color of his irises, washed out by the light. “They’re going to be in a show.”
“Really? When?”
“In January. In New York. A friend of the family owns the gallery and I sent her some shots and she was crazy about them.” He ducks his head. “I do need permission from my models.”
“Of course. I gave it when I sat for you.”
“Do you think Kaleb will give it?” He put the phone down. “I can do the show without his, but it’s one of the pieces that knocked me into the next step.”
“That seems weird, Tyler. I don’t want to ask him.”
He nods.
“What other paintings are you showing?”
“A couple you haven’t seen, recent things, a guy I kept seeing in Santiago, and a couple of others. A fresh one of Lena.”
An old girlfriend, the bartender at the Musical Spoon. “I thought you guys didn’t talk.”
He doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “When I went to Santiago to train, she stored all my art at her place.”
A flicker of anger licks the upper edge of my belly. “So she also knew that you were making an Olympic bid?”
“Yes.” He lifts his gaze. “Sorry.”
For a minute, I am filled with all the things that are wrong here, wrong with him, with us. I watch the people going by the window and think about him painting and going after Rick with such violence.
Not today. I don’t have to be mad at him today. “When did you do all this work, Tyler? You had to be so tired at night after training so much.”
“Keeps me out of the bars. I paint instead of partying.” He raises his eyebrows. “Does that buy me a little grace?”
“A little,” I relent. “But you’ve used up two of your chances. Three is all you get.”
“Understood.” He takes a gulp from his pint and puts it down. “Will the show matter to the movie stuff? Do you want to clear it with your—what? Agent or whoever?”
“Good point.” I frown. “I’ll ask.”
“I can pull them if necessary. No big deal.”
“Well,” I say, touching his arm, tracing the curve of a vein, “except that it matters to you. New York show—that’s kind of big, right? A way to prove to your family that you’re not wasting your life?”
That slight shrug. “I might not tell them.” That rueful twist of his lips shows how much he’s keeping tamped down, how much emotion is boiling under the surface. “That way they can’t fuck anything up, right?”
“I guess so.” I lift my glass. “To the show and to your Olympic bid.”
He drops his hand beneath the table, settling it on my leg. I don’t move away. The tips of his fingers graze my bare thigh. He picks up his pint in his left hand and takes a sip. “Cheers to that.”
“Cheers.” The beer is deep and cold and malty, just the way I like it, and I drink a deep gulp. Studying his profile, I try to imagine him painting in a hotel room, alone. It seems lonely, but I don’t say so. The beer starts to settle in my neck and I let myself absorb the details of his real-live, physical presence in front of me. His earlobe. His jaw. The flare of his nostrils. His streaked, brown and blond eyebrows. “You’re so blond now.”
He looks up, half smiling. “Sun. Streaks it all out.” He gathers a tendril of my hair and wraps it around his wrist. “You, too.”
“The sun is pretty intense here.”
For a minute, he just looks at me, and I find myself looking at his mouth, that spot right in the center of the lower lip that often gets chapped, the white edge of a tooth. I want to touch the goatee with my fingertips, but I don’t.
Instead, I kiss him, doing exactly what I want to do in this exact moment.
This time, it’s slower, less urgent. Our mouths remember the other’s. Our tongues swirl in recognition. He scoots closer, and his fingers slide up my thigh under my skirt, almost all the way up to my panties, and back down, leaving a trail of incandescent heat along the outside of my thigh.
He tilts his head and uses his free hand to pull me closer. It’s dark in this corner booth, and we’re hidden from the most of the bar, but there’s safety in making out here, where no clothes will come off, where I won’t go too far just because I’ve lost my head.
Under the table, he slides his fingers up again, very lightly stroking the inside of my mid-thigh. Glancing over his shoulder to the disinterested bartender who is watching the television, a towel thrown over his shoulder, he pulls my other hand over to the placket of his jeans. A fierce hard-on meets my fingers. “So hard a cat couldn’t scratch it.”
The phrase makes me laugh, and I press my hand into the erection, hard. “I can’t really do anything about it.”
“Not here,” he rumbles. His head is tilted back, showing his throat, and his lids are heavy, low over the jeweled irises. “We could get a room somewhere.”
I move my hand down to his thigh. “No, I can’t.”
“We don’t have to do anything exactly.” His fingers slide over my thigh, between my legs, and I slam my legs together to trap his fingers. He laughs.
“Remember when we had dinner at Nosh and you didn’t wear any panties?” he whispers. “Remember what I did in the doorway?”
I close my eyes, very much alive with memory. His tongue between my legs in the darkness, my skirt hiked up over my hips, air brushing over my naked skin.
He leans in and kisses my neck, sending a shudder through me, ripples that rock all the way down my spine, into my belly and down to the growing urgent heat between my legs. “I want to look at you, Jess,” he whispers. “Touch you.”
“Tyler,” I whisper, my thighs softening against my will as I think of his eyes on me. His hair brushes my face, and his fingers slide upward between my thighs, slowly, as if he will stop if I ask. And I should, but his mouth is moving on my neck, lips and hot tongue discreetly overwhelming me. “I—”
“We don’t have to have sex. Just lie there, let me draw you again. That’s all.”
Urgently, I capture his hand. The rules are of my own making and I have to stick with them. If I make choices because I’m horny—and I suddenly think I’ve gone way too long without sex— I’ll stay stuck in this crazy spot forever. “No,” I say.
He pulls back, takes a breath and then a big gulp of beer. We sit side by side in thick silence for what feels like a long time.
“Don’t be mad,” I say. “We don’t have a lot more time.”
He takes my hand, palm to palm, and pulls it into his lap. “I know. And here we are. Look.” He gestures toward the window, where there are people walking by. A girl laughs at something her friend says, and we almost hear the sound. The sky is getting darker; night is falling. Some people have come into the pub and the sound of their conversations layers in over the music and the faint noise of the television.
“What am I looking at?” I ask, bewildered.
“Just…t
his.” He raises my hand and kisses the back. “Now.”
I nod, gently, feeling something settle at the tone of his voice.
“When I went to jail, I read a shit-ton. Wasn’t anything else to do, so I read everything in the prison library. All of Cicero. You know Cicero?” I shake my head. “He was this Roman politician, big constitutionalist, but I would never have read him if I hadn’t been stuck in jail with nothing to do.”
“Nothing to do but read.” I smile. “That’s a kind of heaven to me.”
He takes my joke the right way. “I know, Ms. Bookworm, you’d love it. It wasn’t my natural way of doing things, but it was really good for me. For some reason, whoever stocked this library loved plays and poetry, so I read them. Our Town, Thorton Wilder—did you read that in high school?”
“Yeah. Our English class acted it out, with costumes and everything, on stage. I love it.” I think back, turning my pint glass in its wet circle on the table. “‘Goodbye’…something, something, something ‘new ironed dresses.’” The picture of the dress I wore comes back to me, yellow cotton sprigged with tiny rosebuds, and then my memory tosses up something else. “My mom was there.”
His thumb moves over the angle of my wrist, and he’s quiet, waiting for me to add to that.
“I didn’t think she was going to come. And then I saw her in the audience, so skinny that sometimes people asked me if she was anorexic or something, but that was just from smoking and too much energy.” The memory slips away. “That’s all. I just remembered that she was there, with Henry. So proud of me.”
“Moments,” he says. “You can just open up that moment, see her in the audience. It doesn’t go away. It’s right there. Always.”
Inexplicably, it makes my eyes sting, and I have to take a gulp of beer. “Yeah.”
“And now,” he says. “This will be a memory, but right now, we’re in it.” He pulls our linked hands up between us and lets go, opening my hand to smooth his fingers over the center of my palm. “I’m here with you, looking at your hand. And your beautiful hair and your scrubby little nails—” He—“ he grins.
“Greenhouse. You can’t have nails and work in dirt.” I take his hand into both of mine. His nails are healthy and square and broad at the end of long fingers, but— “No paint. I’m disappointed.”